Touching and intriguing.
Balanced, well-researched exploration of the vanishing world of nuns in America.
Religion journalist Briggs (Holy Siege, 1992) sets out to understand why the population of American nuns has dropped from 185,000 in 1965 to fewer than 70,000—most of them more than 50 years old—in 2005. The reasons are complex, but he pinpoints three major factors. First, a historical ambivalence about, or even hostility toward, nuns within the Catholic hierarchy. Second, the upheaval caused by Vatican II reforms, coupled with the rise of cultural feminism. Third, the constant stonewalling and badgering with which the hierarchy greeted American sisters’ attempts to reform on their own. Rather than producing a diatribe against the patriarchy, however, Briggs takes the view that even the most conservative bishops and cardinals involved in these battles were simply doing what they thought was best for the church. The decades in question were confusing for all and fraught with sea changes, he reminds us. His narrative moves from the 1950s, when nuns wore full habits, rarely ventured into public and adhered to stringent rules, through the ’80s, when they were often barely recognizable in a crowd and mainly worked outside the convent, often in social-justice organizations. In between was a period of drastic change that saw thousands of sisters abandon the religious lifestyle, as its very definition was rewritten. Though the author concludes with a somewhat pessimistic forecast for the future of American nuns, he makes evident the indomitable spirit of those who do remain. Briggs has researched the topic thoroughly, and his text is filled with the voices of sisters and former sisters (though some comparison with how nuns from the rest of the world weathered the same period would have been helpful).
Touching and intriguing.Pub Date: June 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51636-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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